Date: 2009

"These are some of the things // you don't have to know because the melody / is like a small bird, maybe a yellow canary, / that wings its way into your mind / --no, into your heart-- / where there's a perch already // set up for it, a little trapeze / to swing back and forth on as it sings / and...

— Raab, Lawrence (b. 1946)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"'Unraveling' was our family euphemism for senility."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: May 17, 2010

"But Ashbery often writes from the position of the slackened mind, billowing with whatever passes through it; Armantrout generally writes in tautened distress, even when she's being funny."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: June 1, 2010

"Books live in the mind like honey inside a beehive.

— McGrath, Campbell (b. 1962)

Date: 2010

"Grey could still feel Zero's mind roving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"Yet somehow, while he'd slept, the name had taken up residence in his head, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to a song played over and over, the lyrics digging a rut into his brain like a plow, and now part of his mind was still in that rut and couldn't get out."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: November 14, 2010

"When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn’t evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio."

— Sapolsky, Robert (b. 1957)

Date: November 14, 2010

"What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?"

— Sapolsky, Robert (b. 1957)

Date: June 1, 2010

"Anyone who's closely read Mr. Hitchens's work -- including his best-selling manifesto 'God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' (2007) -- or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments ...

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)

Date: June 1, 2010

"His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew."

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)